


A Shadow, A Thread, A White Crow

by AveryKinkade



Category: The Black Company Series - Glen Cook
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Grief/Mourning, Meta, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 04:07:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19433602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AveryKinkade/pseuds/AveryKinkade
Summary: "Perhaps you were right about me, Standardbearer. It is possible that I already tire of rest." Her voice went flat, businesslike, transactional. "What if we were always collaborators, all along?"Murgen finds what he's looking for with the help of an unexpected ally.--set in the approximate canonical placement of this series of events in SOLDIERS LIVE, around the time of Soulcatcher's interment on the glittering plain, told from Murgen's point of view; a travelogue of sorts





	A Shadow, A Thread, A White Crow

I don't remember when that hag first started poking her talons through my dream life again, but it was sometime after we caught her for good. Trapped in a cage she'd designed herself; a cage she'd intended for her wayward niece, the old man's daughter, the Daughter of Night herself. 

Soulcatcher was too sick to live but Lady couldn't let her die, either. 

There was something difficult to swallow about that, after all these years. After all her crimes. She laid waste to the southlands, and near as any of us could tell, she'd mostly done it because being dead was too boring. For her, anyway. For our friends, our comrades in arms, our families?

We finally had something that could put her ass down for good and it wasn't even a weapon, just some nasty flu from the death goddess Kina herself, by Croaker's reckoning, but Lady vetoed any and all versions of the plan that involved an execution. 

I think, though she never said it where I could hear, that Lady just couldn't stand the idea of doing it again. How many times did any of them have to die? Between the Taking and the end of the dominion, she'd died twice over before that meddling fool had dug up the Ten who were Taken and started their whole messy kingdom over again; hundreds of years. Hell, Lady herself already had Croaker cut that witch's head off once and it didn't even take. It stood to reason that a second time wasn't going to go any better than the first, I guess. Just inflame existing tensions and we had enough of those as it was. No sense provoking further chaos.

With Soulcatcher's body bound in the caves on the glittering plain, it was perhaps only the faintest bit startling to see a white crow after so many years, but I didn't have to like it. Her grasp was limitless, her true physical form even more static and preserved than several hundred years of sorcery had done for that artificially youthful figure we'd graciously deposited in the demon Shivetya's realm. 

Didn't dare breathe a word of that in front of either of them; I knew Croaker would deny it and I suspected Lady didn't want to admit it, either. It was fair enough. Like I didn't know from difficult family. I sank into that a bit on my own and didn't want to bring that up, either. The last of my own wife's kin was gone, aside from me and our son, and what had I done? Turned around and dragged him away again, in the hopes we could add "reconnaissance" and "training" to what was in most other ways a funeral procession for the Black Company's finest enemy. The source of our emblem, the source of countless losses, the source of something unspeakably chaotic and hateful.

*

The first time it happened, I don't recall the place I'd gone in the dream; one of our interminable marches, long before Dejagore; long before Sarie, a place where my mind was on nothing of consequence and there was much less hanging over me. Fewer ghosts, fewer obligations. Fewer desires to hang it all up and start my damn turnip farm.

Where I'd seen endless fields of Kina's victims so many times, the whole of human civilization laid waste for her purification--or putrefaction, you can't ever really tell with a goddess of death or something darker than death--for once I saw old friends who hadn't even seen the shores of the southlands, friends I barely knew but for the stories we told about them after. It settled on me, even in dreams, that I have long been accountable to those folks, and I hoped that I had done them some justice in the telling. There were damn few of us left to tell it now. 

And then I felt something pulling at my thoughts, a stray thread snagged and unraveling from the rest of the fabric. At the edges, something had begun to fray. Someone trying to pull apart the thread of my own damn dreams. 

That was always her thing, Soulcatcher, she liked tangling things up like string, thieving mother of crows. It was easy to hate her for everything she'd done to all of us, and that was only what we'd seen her doing, what she'd let us see. What she wanted us to notice her meddling in, when we watched her crows as her crows watched us. It was different now, seeing as her squadron of crows was reduced to one albino beast, who flitted with a careful eye, keenly aware of its delicate place in a shifting food chain. 

The first time I caught her lurking in my mind again, after so many years without her skulking about, all she did was laugh, in dozens of her hideous voices, until I woke up, my throat parched, my head pounding. Had she seen something? Had I? 

In the grey of the interminable space between dusk and dawn I lay awake and pondered on it some. The only advantage to following that soggy wizard Smoke around in dream, twenty years past, was that he was terrified of her, wouldn't even get near her if he sensed her lurking about. 

I, on the other hand, without his fussy disposition to guide my meandering, had no such scruples. I was, if anything, tempted by the glint in her wicked eyes. I'd gladly chase that squawking crow knowing full well that she held full and utter control over this realm. I'd follow her in the hopes that I might be able to bite back, even once, even if she would otherwise devour me and everything I had ever known, nothing more than crow food on an endless plain of suffering. Surely, I owed her that much. One good run straight at the throat; if I missed, so be it. 

She had tormented me so, for so many years. I had every reason to hate her, in living and in death and in dream. Why was she there, fishing around, her mean little beak in my business again?

"Bored already, Catcher?" I muttered to myself. 

In the distance, I heard the awkward squawk of a crow. That cocky old witch. 

Maybe I'd get lucky and something would eat her, but when had I ever been lucky? Really just the one time, the rest of it's been falling backwards, and forwards, and all over myself.

I didn't bother talking it out with Croaker; he'd just lecture me about poking sorcerers who are bound by disposition to poke you right back. 

I thought about asking Lady but damned if I didn't just about hate that idea, too. She might be Soulcatcher's sister but all that meant now that Lady had some indeterminate portion of her ancient powers was that she knew better than any of us what Soulcatcher was capable of, and she wasn't any better at guessing what she was liable to stir up than the rest of us. 

*

The journey back north, after we drove our pleasant guest to her new home was hard, made lighter only by the relatively pleasant company in tow after we'd made our long goodbyes to the old demon realm again. 

My boy--my son--I never stopped wondering at that teenager I'd only gotten a few years to know. Most of his childhood, one or both of us were ghosts at the time. He was a better wizard than any of the wizards I'd personally known except maybe Silent, but Silent was pretty fucking broken by the time I ever met him, and that wasn't a long tour or a good one. But it was one of the old times and every so often when them old days climb into your head you've got to flick through the Annals of the mind's eye and see why. 

Tobo was a natural flier; not sure where that came from on account of both his mother and I both hate it, but I don't doubt it represents something different to him. For us it's sorcery and heartache, separation and suffering embodied in a single terrifying act. No thank you, avoid whenever possible. Whenever the old man isn't prodding you onto the flying carpet at swordspoint. 

I have little doubt the sky is the only place Tobo can be free from worldly restraint. Or, at the very least, parental restraint. Sahra had so little to cling to for so many years. Only fitting she'd want both of our willful son's wayward feet squarely on the ground. It lets him fit in with the other little sorcerers well enough, so I reined in my litany of concerns, but I've seen enough flying carpets yanked from the sky by a well-placed firebolt that I'm not sure if I'll ever get comfortable watching. He horsed around on the flying posts with his little Voroshk girlfriend, Shukrat, and I mostly tried to ignore that he was old enough to think girls were Interesting. 

It was hard not to envy him the ease of courtship, considering what Sahra and I went through. I liked to think we'd made it easy for him by having been such young fine specimens ourselves, back when. (He got his looks from his charming mother and his unerring humility and grace from me, after all.)

Our return trip was quieter, at least: Shivetya had made some pact with that little geek sorcerer, Howler, who howled no more. Or, a lot less, anyway. If you'd done nothing but scream for centuries, you'd probably have a hard time not screaming anymore either. 

It did not, however, make him a more reliable carpet pilot, nor did he smell any better than he had in his less peaceful incarnations. The resulting nausea was well-earned.

*

We made camp that night, still a day's travel from home--home, he says, like he's ever really had a home, like war isn't his home, like he has ever lived somewhere that isn't hell for any length of time!

That night brought forth another journey backward, as I fell into a deep sleep. Another journey into a place tinged with sadness that nonetheless held its perfect moments; a night where Sahra and I had scrounged a moment's peace in a shabby tent with a single mat and what passed for a blanket as we slept, and didn't, just outside a city ravaged by magic and fire.

I settled into it as I always had, when I traveled like this, I was able to hold what I saw; Sahra, silent as she always was in those days, beautiful as she ever was, her back to me, silhouetted in dim oil-lamp light.

I traced my fingers over her neck and drew my hand back in horror. A hideous, ragged, raised scar at the circumference of her neck. I leapt back, unable to even scream as she turned her head. That face I had drawn in dreams and in life, that perfect image--here, instead of my Sarie, cold blue eyes older than the ages burned through me. This wasn't my memory--this was someone tampering with my memory, this was someone out to carve up every last thing I still held dear for her own enjoyment. That cackling bitch.

"Get out, get out, get out--" I screamed, flailing at her--terrified that the creature in my mind's eye was somehow, forever, reworked into Soulcatcher's form. I wanted to hit her. I didn't dare. 

"I wanted to do you a mercy, Standardbearer." The voice was quiet, small, not one of the thousands she'd used in my presence before.

"You've never wanted to do something merciful in your entire fucking life. Not even for yourself."

She grinned, using Sarie's face with her cruel eyes embedded in it. I looked away, I couldn't bear it, the hatred boiling in my throat.

"You have traveled how far, and for so long, and yet you are still afraid," she murmured. "Your fears are real, but they have shackled you, like anyone at war with something yet to lose."

"Everything to lose," I spat back. "Everything I've lost, countless times, countless years, lost to you, to your endless, tireless games."

"It is strange to rest. I don't like it." She used one of her bubbly voices and flicked her hair over her shoulder, a calculated maneuver, a baffling conceit to appear coy.

"I know that." 

"I'm just trying to show you something, the only way I know how to. Something important," her voice went cross, petulant, the errant scolding only a teenager can dispense. A familiar sound, in my family.

"Stop."

She turned to stare at me, slowly, her expression curious, as if she'd only just arrived, and I gasped. Sarie. I reached out.

"I can explain, but I'd rather not," I murmured as I stepped toward my wife, as if I'd stepped back into myself after--

After twenty years and more. My body did not look much older than it did back then even now, but the time away, the time trapped in Shivetya's realm, had done plenty to be sure my mind was as old and weary as the ones who'd never left.

I sank back into the past, into Sarie, into her arms.

*

There was news that I was clearly not meant to receive, when we finally returned to the front. Croaker and Sleepy conferenced anon; the Captain expressly pressed one of the other lieutenants to steer me out of her way. 

We were old friends, she and I, but if she was avoiding telling me something it generally meant it was something I ought to know but was expected to react poorly to. Predictable old me. Flies off the handle at the first sign of trouble.

And of course it was. No one had seen Ky Sahra since this last battle began; she'd been helping folks until she wasn't, and now no one knew where she was. 

Somewhere within me, another thread snapped.

*

I went out of myself in that moment quicker than I ever had at any other time of my life, to hear the way Croaker told me later.

"It was all we could do to catch you. Damn near hit your head."

"Nothing important, then," I replied. Mercifully, the old man took it as a joke and didn't press it. 

"It was like before, but not quite," he continued. "Did you ever really get control of that?"

"Wouldn't call it control." I cocked my head at him. "Haven't had any of my little spells in years, but... It'd be hard to argue that wasn't what happened."

I did not tell him where I had gone, what I had seen. What I hadn't seen. What I was still looking for, leaning halfway out of myself, if I was being honest about it.

"You're in there now, though, aren't you?"

"In where?" Hell? I felt like I was trying to swim across the sea, to hold on to the body that sat with Croaker in his tent. I tried to stand up and the old man very nearly sat on me to keep me down.

"Tobo's already searching. I can't lose you both, not right now, not for someone who--"

"Not for my wife? Croaker, I've lost her how many times?" I bellowed. "How many times do I have to before there aren't any more?"

"And if she's already gone?"

"If she's already gone, so am I," I replied.

"That's what I'm afraid of." Croaker sighed. "Murgen, use your head. We don't have much left now, and this last... Captain says we're still picking over the dead to see who's still living. Give it time, please. I know how much time you've already had to give."

"Then you have to know exactly why I can't."

He stood up, and gestured to the flap, as if he meant for me to actually go, as if he'd expected nothing else this entire time. That pedantic asshole. He really needed to be sure I knew how chapped he was at letting me go before I went. 

That Croaker really knows how to show a guy he cares.

*

Nothing. Less than nothing. 

Not even the taunting of a lone white crow.

*

Tobo was convinced of his mother's passing without half the struggle I was. He saw her, he said, same as Gota and the rest, his ancestors who hung about as the chorus to his convictions.

Is that where you went, Sarie? 

I can't begin to picture a fate worse than to linger on with Ky Gota to forever harangue you, but with Tobo, it was different. He'd had his whole life to deal with Nyueng Bao expectations and visions and customs.

I went out. I had probably been out more than in, lately, a regular barn cat about the whole thing.

When I came back now, I seldom felt the hunger I had so often after walking through all of time and back again. How much of that was the regular hollowness of grief, I couldn't say. I'd done this before. I'd lived this before. I'd endured so much time lost to searching for her, the first time she was rendered dead to me, when Gota contrived to split us forever, to punish her for fulfilling her grandmother's little prophecy.

In those days I had returned to life ravenous, like the emptiness it left me with was just the energy I'd depleted in my travels. This? This was a hollowness that I couldn't fill with anything, so I didn't try. The last time, I'd had answers, even if they were lies. Answers were something you could use to find the next set of questions. This wasn't even a question.

*

When I found Soulcatcher again--where was I? I didn't even know anymore. I was wandering between villages too far for Sahra to have gone if she'd been wounded, but I couldn't live with the curiosity, and I wasn't about to die with that curiosity, without even trying to look.

"Standardbearer!" She called out; her voice shriller than it would have been if she'd just used the one that came with the crow.

"What now?" I seethed. The crow settled on a boulder aside the lonely road I found myself on.

"She's looking for you, but she doesn't know how to travel this place. Not as we do. She's unmoored, adrift. I can't help her, but I can help you."

"And why would you do that? We both know you've never had a heart, so that can't be it."

"Perhaps you were right about me, Standardbearer. It is possible that I already tire of rest." Her voice went flat, businesslike, transactional. "What if we were always collaborators, all along?"

"Collaborators." That stung, at the heart of it, not least because there was a long time in the Company that we had been. The standard I bore, the standard she invoked, the banner it flew was her own sigil. From Those Days in the Service of the Syndic of Beryl, before even my own time in the Black Company. Absently, I grazed my fingers over the pewter badge, the hideous fire-breathing skull, its left eye a glass gem meant to evoke a ruby, cracked and scratched from the hell I'd put it through, but no less a mark of my service, of the service of the men I'd led.

In collaboration? In war. In death. Beyond death.

"I know you see it. Do you really think it strange?"

Probably not any stranger than anything else she'd done to me, but I wasn't about to concede the point. I gritted my teeth.

"I could have taken her for my own, you know."

She had, in her own way; that night, returning from the plain--but no, she hadn't taken Sahra's voice and mind and heart, had she? She'd used my damn fool memories to tell me something. I scowled, waiting for a longer explanation.

"I always liked you, Standardbearer." Her voice was authoritative, now, like she was parroting Lady; a confident young woman whose ancient macabre knowledge guided that confidence. "You cared, you see. Emotions make a delightful mess of what ought to be business between friends. Your vulnerabilities made this much sweeter than I could have ever asked, not even of my meddlesome sister nor that fool Croaker."

I weighed what she had to say about me and figured she was at least half-right or I wouldn't have been here in the first place. The Company doesn't surrender; none of us do, but there were certainly moments where it had to be said the fight had gone out of someone.

"Not you," she said. Spooky.

"That's a lie, and we both know it," I scolded the crow, wagged my finger at it.

"Your fight isn't over, Standardbearer, but I can show you where to look."

In retrospect it ought to have occurred to me that that fucking crow can't actually talk. What I heard, how I heard it. Where I was. I've always been able to drift through my surroundings, haven't I, and plenty of times without a care in the world.

What can I say? I followed. I know not where.

*

In a place and time that I do not care to describe, the crow left me behind. At first, I thought it was another game of Catcher's. Certainly she was a creature of games.

And then I heard it. Faint but growing louder, a rush of wordless emotion that nevertheless might have drowned me.

"Mur!" She called out, and with that one sound, I was done. 

I might as well have been trying to speak through a torrential downpour. I could hardly shake her name loose from my throat, a hoarse whisper drowned out by a tidal wave. "Sarie."

"I was starting to think I'd never find you again. I thought..." her voice broke. "I thought it would be easy. I thought maybe it would be like before."

"Never," I replied, with a short laugh through my own tears.

"I can't... I can't leave here without you. Not again."

"I know. We'll figure something out. You're smarter and stronger than I ever deserved."

"Don't."

"It's true. Look. We lost everything how many times? I'm not going to lose it all again." I stared at her. "You know where to go? And when?"

She nodded, and vanished, and the loss of the sight of her was about all I could bear.

I did not see her, but I heard the distant call of a crow, and followed it home. Body-home, not heart-home.

But heart-home wasn't far away now, not anymore.

*

Past that point, I had damn near nothing left of myself. Perhaps that was Soulcatcher's little victory, that she had seen me through to some damnable conclusion after all this time.

I might've been in my body, but I was tethered primarily by my ambivalent fears for my headstrong son. The young man who had become something almost in spite of my limited presence. I was not really holding it together, but he had decided to channel his grief into righteousness, and that righteousness had led him to the notion that he might sock our enemies right where it hurt while both sides were still licking their wounds. 

We were going to ambush the palace where we'd spent so much time, in so many different and equally pointless battles, against the Great General, Mogaba, whose defection from our own ranks had been so long ago it was as if we'd never once all been Company.

Well, there had always been more than one Company, back then; but it was different now. No use dwelling on what we'd never been able to work out, not in decades now.

"It's perfect," Tobo said, washing up for the morning with some foul device he got from Shukrat, some Voroshk dental magic. He hadn't gotten the same years and years of old One-Eye's practical dental spells, and that rotten little wizard had kicked it before he'd taught Tobo half of it. He looked like a frothing dog, with that odd, hefty stick in his mouth.

"Perfect," I parroted at him, and he looked like I'd stuck my foot out to trip him up. I shrugged--I was just trying to be funny.

"I just meant... they'll never expect us to get in. They have no idea how well we know the palace, not even if they knew how often I'd been there."

*

Croaker was a physician before he was the Annalist and one of the many, many captains our little outfit had put forward even in the years I had served. This meant many things about his disposition; he was gifted with a dark humor and a bedside manner that got us all through a lot of tough shit. It also meant he had no truck with self-pity and a hygienic, acerbic way about him when things were shifting out of his grasp. Emotions, even his own, were like open wounds that merited swift action and sturdy stitches to close them off against infection.

"How are you holding up, Murgen?"

He didn't generally ask questions he didn't want answers to, even if those answers went against his expectations, so I answered and hoped he'd understand.

"Frankly, old friend, I'm done. I reckon no one would stop me if I turned tail and fled for the old turnip farm."

He took a deep breath, biting back what his first response would have been. Maybe he was more flappable than I thought. The old romantic in him still had something left in there.

"It'd be a shame to lose you. There aren't many of us old-timers left. You're good with languages, you've led bad men through worse odds."

"I have."

"I can't stop you from leaving. I can ask you to think about Tobo."

"He's not a boy anymore." I grinned. 

"I know he wanted you to help him with the palace strike." He was testing every last weak point he could get so much as a toehold on, but I held fast.

"I can do that." 

"You don't think he's lost enough?"

"He lost me for longer than he ever had me. He's a strong young man. He'll do just fine." Funny how sometimes you have to say something to convince yourself.

"What are you going to tell him? When you plan to leave?"

"He's already talking to his mother plenty." At this, I bit my lip and held in the rest.

"I was really hoping this was about a different kind of desertion, you know. You had me feeling really optimistic about this turnip farm."

"I've always been a dab hand at bluffing."

"Murgen, I've played how many hands of tonk with you? You can't even begin to lie about lying well." Croaker shook his head with a startled laugh. 

"You impugn my dignity and good graces to my face, good sir?"

Croaker offered up a half-grin. "Better than behind your back."

*

I dressed for battle as I always had, from the first time I held that battle standard. Most of the others were outfitted in the armor of our Voroshk counterparts. Tobo's only attempt at complaint met with a headshake from me.

"I can't deal with this new-fangled shadow stuff, son. I'll do what I've always done."

One does not need to carry the standard into a covert operation, but I felt like I was. I had not been the standardbearer for a long, long time, but in my mind's eye, I upheld the banner under which so much blood had already been shed, a flood unceasing across four hundred years which would doubtless continue apace.

*

Soulcatcher had already told me what I had to do. 

The only reason I had for trusting her was that there was nothing much else to be done with it. Sometimes you listen to someone because it's the only thing you can hear. 

I eased out of myself, as I'd done so many times before. It was weird to do it with such purpose--less like cutting strings than it was like puppeting them for a short time, at such a distance that there was no immediate surprise nor alarm when the monstrous shadows that protected the palace sprang out to attack. 

There was no time. We were overwhelmed--countered in our own ambush. 

A devastating loss, and another, and another.

*

It was harder to do this without anything to come back to, I realized, once I'd dropped the last of the strings of being.

Every place I'd ever been and seen and felt rushed past me and I froze in terror for a moment, not wanting to miss it, not wanting to lose my only chance to have her back.

No. She'd done it. She found me, on the outskirts of the skirmish. Which skirmish? Did it matter? Never again. 

A tiny tent, a place of urgently temporary accommodations. Only one bed between the two of us. What were we supposed to do? We had all the time in the universe.

"Sarie," I whispered, leaning into her arms. 

She whispered back, "Mur," and rested her head on my shoulder.

We held each other, beheld each other, the people we had tried to be for each other. We had literally never lived outside of war, but as the battle receded around us, further into the distance, I wondered what kind of peace we might be able to make.

**Author's Note:**

> fic for a 48-hour challenge; something in the combined details of the challenge dug up a lot of Deep Feels I had about this series apparently.
> 
> the prompt, for posterity's sake, not because I did a good job following it to the spirit of the thing more so than the letter necessarily:
> 
> Trope 1: Only One Bed  
> Trope 2: Hurt/Comfort  
> Item: overly fancy electric toothbrush  
> Quote: "That's what I was afraid of."
> 
> I submitted three fandoms and this was the one the RNG prescribed.


End file.
